Pamela Kayes mother, Anneliese, was seventeen years old when she left Germany, the Fatherland, the only place she had ever known, in 1956. She was anxious for the chance to reinvent herself in the United States after World War II had devastated her country. In this memoir, she tells of her journey to America and how she discovered the truth about her Russian-Jewish heritage. Broken Glass behind the China Cabinet narrates how she began her new life in the United States as a paid servant for a family in Kansas City, Missouri; how she struggled as a young immigrant girl to find her place in this new world; and how she became a citizen in 1961. She shares the story of the people who impacted her journey and how she accidentally discovered the real story about who she is. Based on the diary of Anneliese, Broken Glass behind the China Cabinet shares a story of perseverance and communicates how one womans look into the past impacted her future.
The Boy Behind the China Cabinet: a Memoir about Addiction, Hollywood, Mother Teresa and Me is the eclectic story of one man's coming to terms with himself. It is tragic, and at times hysterically funny, as the memoir recounts growing up in the Bronx in a large Catholic Italian family and living through his oldest brother's drug addiction. It is a story of self-discovery, as he leaves home to pursue an acting career in Hollywood. It is also a story of faith as he meets Mother Teresa, leaves Hollywood, and pursues the life of a missionary in one of the strictest orders of the Catholic Church. Filled with engaging stories about the Hollywood elite, Mother Teresa, struggles in the convent, and persevering in the face of adversity, this story shows how touching and sometimes shattering the journey to find yourself can be.
Winner of the prestigious Prix Femina, The Boy is an expansive and entrancing historical novel that follows a nearly feral child from the French countryside as he joins society and plunges into the torrid events of the first half of the 20th century. The boy does not speak. The boy has no name. The boy, raised half-wild in the forests of southern France, sets out alone into the wilderness and the greater world beyond. Without experience of another person aside from his mother, the boy must learn what it is to be human, to exist among people, and to live beyond simple survival. As this wild and naive child attempts to join civilization, he encounters earthquakes and car crashes, ogres and artists, and, eventually, all-encompassing love and an inescapable war. His adventures take him around the world and through history on a mesmerizing journey, rich with unforgettable characters. A hamlet of farmers fears he’s a werewolf, but eventually raise him as one of their own. A circus performer who toured the world as a sideshow introduces the boy to showmanship and sanitation. And a chance encounter with an older woman exposes him to music and the sensuous pleasures of life. The boy becomes a guide whose innocence exposes society’s wonder, brutality, absurdity, and magic. Beginning in 1908 and spanning three decades, The Boy is as an emotionally and historically rich exploration of family, passion, and war from one of France’s most acclaimed and bestselling authors.
An unforgettable memoir about growing up Southern, grappling with faith, and confronting a childhood colored by religion, Bible Belt culture, and a mother who minces words better than a food processor A child stumbles upon a vintage photograph and glimpses salvation. A young girl vanishes in a famous cavern when she runs away from her tour group. A hijacked plane circles overhead, its passengers’ lives in jeopardy. A mystical stranger, a refugee from the Holocaust, seals off her secrets behind an elusive smile. From simple blessings to historical tragedies to random twists of fate, This Boy’s Faith plumbs the uncanny mysteries and surprising revelations at the heart of a Southern Baptist childhood. Hamilton Cain came to Jesus on a trampoline, or as his devout parents described it, “He just jumped and bounced his way to the Lord.” Growing up in Tennessee in the 1970s and ’80s, he set himself on the path to becoming the best Baptist boy he could be. The veil between the concrete and the magical shimmered all around him, nourishing his soul. Religion was a map to help him navigate his life, to steer away from the reefs of temptation. Yet as he grew older, Hamilton began to notice fractures and cracks in a world that had once promised sanctuary and transcendence, perils threatening to shatter the protective shell of family and community. Like an escape artist, he cut himself free from his evangelical milieu, and eventually gravitated north, to cosmopolitan New York. Twenty years later, the smooth flow of Hamilton’s life reversed itself yet again when his first child was born with a grave genetic disease. Thrown into a chasm of confusion and despair, he found the primal voices of his original culture reaching out to him. He picked up that faded, half-forgotten script to see what values, if any, could steady him in the here and now. The result is a story of growing up Baptist, and then growing up. Haunting, evocative, and gorgeously written, Hamilton Cain’s debut will resonate with fans of poignant personal memoir, readers interested in faith and spirituality, and anyone who has known what it’s like to engage the complexities and contradictions of one’s past.
Geoffrey Beattie grew up in the notorious 'murder triangle' in North Belfast, where during thirty years of the Troubles more than six hundred people were killed. Many of his childhood friends ended up dead or in prison, while Beattie himself moved to England, at first to study and eventually to build a highly successful career as a psychologist. On a visit home to see his ailing mother, Beattie begins to explore his Ulster Protestant ancestry and to reflect on the unfashionable and little understood Protestant community. His search takes him to the trenches of the Somme, to the Plantation villages of Ulster, and to Drumcree for the Orange march. And it also takes him deeper into his mother's character: at the heart of the book is an extraordinarily vivid portrait of this opinonated, witty, exasperating Ulsterwoman. Protestant Boy is an honest, beautifully written book about the stories that families and cultures tell themselves, and about the silences that they leave behind.
Presents an encyclopedia of Jewish culture from 1973 to 2005, including secular and religious examples from the visual arts, literature, and popular culture.
Sixteen-year-old Nathan Conley has been convicted of manslaughter; he has been sentenced to serve five to fifteen years of his life behind bars. With no friends or family on the inside to help keep him safe, he must manage prison life all alone. All the while, he worries whether or not his father, with cancer, will still be alive when his time has been served. But there are bigger concerns Nathan must confront. The biggest problems being if he’s built for what it takes to survive a world of hate, isolation, lack of hope, and the ability to conquer adversity. And if he breaks, there’s no guarantee he will survive.
Based on a true story gleaned from the memories of family members sixty years after the events, from photographs and documents, and from published works of nonfiction describing the times and events described in the narrative, We Came From Konigsberg is set in January 1945. The Soviet Army is poised for the final push through East Prussia and Poland to Berlin. Elisabet Daeker and her five young sons are in Königsberg, East Prussia and have heard the shocking stories of Russian atrocities. They're desperate to escape to the perceived safety of Germany. To survive, Elisabet faces hardships endured at the hands of Nazi hardliners, of Soviet troops bent on rape, pillage and murder, and of Allied cruelty in the Occupied Zones of post-war Germany.
12-year-old Curt Regis lives the carefree life of a beggar and a thief. Homeless since the age of six, he uses his guile and street smarts, as well as a glib, smooth lying tongue to reign as king of the street rats. So when he is caught breaking into a school and is sent back into foster care for the ninth time, he is quite confident that it will be a short stay. He is secure in the knowledge that he will be gone again in a day or two with a new set of clothes on his back and his bag filled with silverware, jewelry and maybe if he is really lucky, a Play station to pawn. However, this time his luck has run out. Curt is sent to what many in the foster-care system consider the perfect home. It is a home from which no one has ever runaway from. A beautiful home where not a word of complaint is ever heard, where in fact very few words are ever spoken and where the only real sounds that disturbs the stagnant air are the screams of the punished.
The War Between the States was a particularly difficult time for those who lived in the South, especially those in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, who quickly became witnesses to many battles and other ravages of that awful conflict. Among those who were beginning to wonder how they could endure all of this was Julia Claiborne, who held great concern for her family and almost daily had to fight off the fear of losing that which had become a big part of herself--their beloved, ancestral plantation, Beulah Land.
